Month: November 2017

Guest Review ~ by Lee

My wife simply cannot believe that in recent weeks I have progressed from an occasional reader. One who mainly reads a Dan Brown or two each year when on holiday to suddenly devouring books. I’ve also gone from having never read a fantasy book to… let’s try The Way of Kings, a Brandon Sanderson behemoth! Actually, I’d never heard of Brandon Sanderson. I found this book quite by accident after watching a YouTube video. So what did I think?

Well, I cannot believe it’s taken me a week of reading every day to complete it! But I couldn’t stop reading it. Yes, the pace is not that fast throughout. But it’s never dull in any way. The character development is excellent, with each of the primary and secondary characters being introduced steadily and built in layers. Brandon doesn’t try to tell you everything about any character too early. The world and its people are also well built. You feel like you understand the cultures and the landscape and even some (that’s been revealed) of the history.

I’ll avoid spoilers, but will add, there are moments where you’re so disappointed with a path the story takes that you look away from the book and say “Seriously!” and there are moments where you’ll punch the air and want to yell “Go on!” like a sports fan cheering their team.

Whether you’ve read fantasy or not, give this book a go, but if you like a glass of wine whilst you read, consider ordering a case.

I’m trying not to fly off the handle, but please indulge me, at least at first, in a bit of tough love.

If your current work in progress contains a scene, or worse, a sequence of scenes, in which the young protagonist spends his or her days at sword training or magic training or frickin’ social studies you must immediately highlight all of that text and delete it now, before it does you any actual harm.

And it will do you harm.

By now I hope you know that I’m not big on hard rules—you have to do this, you can never do that—but the obligatory fight training has, for me at least, gone from cliché to actual annoyance. And it’s in at least half the books I read—maybe two thirds.

Like this:

As the saying goes, stories don’t just write themselves, which means that you, the writer, need to put some effort into the process if you want those wonderful ideas to become a book.

How do you turn ideas into a story?

And where do you start?

Firstly, you need to start is by writing. Some people talk about world building, or scene setting. Some people talk about characters. Some people start with a plan.

I say, ditch all of the above and just jump straight into writing.

Why?

Because until you jump in you don’t really know where your idea is going to take you. Whether it is a single scene or an epic ending, it doesn’t matter just write it down.

Some people get very fixated on where to start, as if you cannot begin unless you have a firm container in which to place the story.

Writing doesn’t need a container. It just needs a writer and an idea.

When a writer begins writing, something magic happens. They start thinking about what happens before the seed idea, and what happens after…and what happens much later…and what happens much earlier. And before you know it, a rough timeline of events is established.

None of this happens until you begin to write so don’t feel you need a plan, or a character profile, or a fully fleshed out world before you can begin. You will need all of these things, but not right now. Now is for fun, and for playing and testing your idea.

Some of these new ideas will become backstory that may be discarded later on.

Some of the ideas may not fit in with the overall story as you fill in the gaps, and you may discard them too.

Once you have enough ideas, or scenes, you can plan, and flesh out character profiles, and worlds, or locations if need be…but not until you have enough ideas to at least hint at a story.

Ideas do not always become a full story, so don’t feel bad if you try and then find it goes nowhere.

Keep thinking, keep generating and testing ideas. The more you practice writing and using your ideas, the more ideas will come. Eventually one of them will become a story, a real story, a full story.

If you’d like more writing tips you can get my eBook, This Craft We Call Writing: Volume One, for free by completing the form below. Inside you’ll find over 150 pages covering everything from dialogue, characterisation, prose and plotting, to writing fight scenes, viewpoint, and much more!

“I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

We read stories to become lost in new and unexplored worlds, ones filled with possibilities, mysteries, and oddities. The world in which a story is set is important to any tale, particularly so when it comes to science fiction and fantasy.

This post will first explore the how to’s of world-building, and then the how to’s of revealing your crafted world through the story.